A very slow wave good-bye to Windows, and a steadfast hello to Linux

I’ve wanted to completely migrate over from Windows to Linux for a very long time, and I am slowly getting there.

Valve release Counter Strike: Global Offensive for Linux a few weeks ago, which triggered me to install Linux on my gaming laptop. I know I won’t be able to completely abandon Windows for quite some time, though. There will be many interesting game releases and programs that will only work on Windows, and I honestly don’t want to involve Wine. I actually wanted to install Arch, but I’m afraid I’ll mess up my HDD and erase my Windows partitions trying to install it, so I settled with Linux Mint 17 instead. I’ve used Mint many times before and I really how how it works, so I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed.

I have a 1 TB SSD (Which is amazing, by the way) in my laptop, so I made some space (around 200 GB I think) and installed Mint there with nVidia’s proprietary drivers. Works like a dream. Since it’s installed on an SSD its boot time is ridiculously short and all programs launch more or less instantaneously. I’ve also noticed that there are many great games being released for Linux nowadays, so I have great hopes for the community and Linux gaming! A very big shout-out to Valve for their support in Linux, and one more to Aspyr for porting so many great games. They are the publishers that have released both Civ V (and soon Civ: Beyond Earth) and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, among many others!

Netflix also very recently implemented complete Linux-support, however only for Google Chrome. It doesn’t work with Chromium or any other open-source browser which is a shame, but I’m alright with using Chrome.

Also, since I use tmux basically everywhere, I’ve come to realize that making all new terminals open tmux instead of my default shell fish is an awesome idea. It’s all too common I open a new terminal, run a program I can’t terminate, and realize I have to start another program on the side. Sure, I can simply open another terminal window, but I find it way too messy to juggle more windows than necessary.

I hope that I will be able to completely leave Windows behind me someday, and I hope that day will come soon.